Video conferencing is a powerful tool for communication and collaboration and helps improve productivity and reduce costs for global companies. Video conferencing facilitates voice-visual communication between geographically distributed teams in organizations.
With the rapid growth of packet-based IP infrastructure, IP-based video conferencing is gaining prominence. Deployment of IP-based video conferencing provides numerous advantages such as lower cost, easier access, rich media integration, network convergence and web-collaboration capabilities.
For purposes of this invention, users or subscribers at different sites who participate in video conferencing through IP videophones or voice over IP phones are referred to as endpoints or participants. The number of endpoints in an IP-based video conferencing system is constrained primarily by two factors. The first is the bandwidth of the communication link between the sites. The second is the processing capability of the endpoint at each site. The latter is dictated by the installed processor capacity in these endpoints, which limits the number of simultaneous video and voice channels that can be processed. Typically, video processing requires significantly higher processing power, which limits the number of possible simultaneous video channels as compared to the number of simultaneous voice channels.
In available prior art, IP-based video conferencing is facilitated by a service provider or a centralized server and may be a managed service that can be prohibitively expensive for private users and small enterprises.